“Yes,” said the old lawyer, “I haven’t the slightest doubt, my young friend, that you have been to blame. That is why the poor child looked so white and pathetic when she said to me that she had no one to consult. When you come to have girls of your own,” Mr. Babington said somewhat severely, “you’ll know how it feels to see a little young creature you are fond of look like that.” Heaven and earth! as if all the old fogeys in the world, if they had a thousand daughters, could feel half what a young lover feels! The blood rose to young Langton’s temples, but he did not trust himself to reply. “Well,” Mr. Babington continued, “it’s all comfortably settled at the last. I had my eye on this solution all along. I may say it was my doing all along, for I carefully refrained from pointing out to him what of course, in an ordinary way, it would have been my duty to point out--that in case of Miss Winifred’s refusal there was no after settlement. You don’t understand our law terms, perhaps? Well, it was just this, that if she refused to accept, there was no provision for what was to follow. I knew all along she would never accept to cut out her brothers--so here we come to a dead stop. He had not prepared for that contingency. I don’t believe he ever thought of it. She had obeyed him all her life, and he thought she would obey him after he was dead. She refused the condition, and here we are in face of a totally different state of affairs. The other wills were destroyed, and this was as good as destroyed by her refusal. What is to be done then but to return to the primitive condition of the matter? He dies intestate, the property is divided, and everybody, with the exception of that scamp Tom, is content.” “I don’t understand,” Langton said: it was true so far, that the words were like an incoherent murmur in his ears--but even while he spoke, the meaning came to his mind like a flash of light. He had put aside all such (as he said to himself) degrading imaginations, and had made up his mind that his work was his life, and that a country doctor he was, and should remain; but, all the same, the sensation of knowing that Bedloe had become unattainable in fact and certainty, not only by the temporary alienation of a misunderstanding, went through his heart like a sudden knife.